


The Light Bends

by verywhale



Category: Darkest Dungeon (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Color of Madness, Gen, Introspection, Not Really Character Death, POV First Person, Refracted Affliction, Religious Conflict, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Loop, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24792280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verywhale/pseuds/verywhale
Summary: The mind of a young vestal, breaking down in fractures of maddening lights, just like the gleam of the comet.
Kudos: 8





	The Light Bends

**Author's Note:**

> I've always been quite annoyed at the fact that Refracted affliction just makes all characters talk and behave in the same way. So that's some sort of canon-divergent exploration of this affliction.

O Light, Lights, Lights in the sky!

We walk further and further in the doomed farm, we float between the shifting grounds, and so many sights are around us that I am no longer aware where we actually are. The flame has crystallized, but it still keeps swaying, and it’s painfully cold; even holding the torch by the opposite tip makes my fingers freeze and turn blue under the glove. Oh I see, I see, and I wish I hadn’t seen this maleful blue corrupting my skin, my flesh, my bones underneath it. Sometimes it bends into red, yellow and green, and my eyes must’ve already burned out and turned hollow like ones of the husks! This is why I must’ve seen things that are to be hidden, like my bones and insides and cloaked foes—and the lights, lights that are no longer as one!

Bigby has told me once of that blasphemy, and Paracelsus has confirmed it. They’ve said that the white Light, pure and almighty, is a fusion of multiple colors, that it breaks apart through the prism. My ears haven’t been flaming as much as during that day, for so much shame I have felt for even listening to their heresy. I’ve told myself _no,_ men of science know nothing of the true Light, and they can’t even reach the truth behind it, as their minds are clouded by skepticism and disbelief of Light’s divinity. They try to break it in pieces, as if it is something tangible, as if it’s nothing more than a block of glass or a chunk of flesh to them. How outrageous and naive, I’ve told myself while my face has turned hot as the Flame itself has been punishing me for even letting their profanity into my mind.

Would they shove this petrified torch into my eyes, would they laugh at me for not believing? And what would I say? Oh no, the Light would burn out their tongues before they utter a word; and then do the same with mine when I try to explain what I see, what sees me, what is brimming behind my eyeballs when I close my eyes.

I don’t remember how many times I have met the comet already. But I remember its terrible eye staring into my soul through my sockets, and my body still shudders and screams the same as when my gaze meets its. I don’t remember how the comet actually looks like. It’s all shards and tears and flashes of color inside my eyes, and I might still not know the real form standing in front of me. Blue, yellow, green, red.

Maybe the comet is all around us as we march and fight? Maybe it looks over us endlessly, just as I’ve believed to be looked over by the Light? It might’ve broken apart, but its power is still in every blotch of color and flash and flicker of blue, yellow, green, red.

I march and I fight, and I shed sizzling tears when the color changes. I don’t understand what I see. I don’t understand what I hear, that language of the shattered Light—it is nothing we have sung in the abbey! Letters on the pages; they melt just like the flesh of the crystals, and they burn my fingers when I touch them. The pages turn empty, and so does my head when I try to recall any Verse, any hymn, any cry for help from the sky. My friends tell me something when I scream and try to throw the damned book away. My friends? Their reflections in the husk of the comet! What do they say? Their pleas echo from the glossy surfaces of the aberrations, and they morph under pressure of the sky constantly bending and blending above our heads—and I understand no word.

The salvation, redemption, forgiveness! I have not seen it ever on earth and I will not see it in cosmos, that is the only thing I know for sure. How terrible must’ve been every sin of one vestal, that the Light couldn’t bear the sight of them and deflected from her, and shattered right in front of her, just so she would see herself suffer. I’ve asked myself before—but why must I suffer? Why does the mother senior and my sisters hate me, why do they want to see my misery? Why does none of the people I call my companions, ever see me as anything worthy? I turn to the Light, or what has remained of it, and it doesn’t answer, and it doesn’t listen. I beg, I cry, and my tears crystallize on my cheeks. It is nothing but my suffering that the Light wants to see now, to watch as it reflects and beams. Red as gleaming hate! Blue as blazing despair! Green as haunting fear! Yellow as splendorous grief!

We stop sometimes—I would say, ‘to catch our breaths’, but silence and pretended serenity of our pauses is only more suffocating. The insides of the mill are nothing but ruins, overgrown with crystals that eat it out like the flesh of the foes we have downed. There’s a giant breach in its ceiling, right where the comet has landed, and it shimmers beautifully and terribly. I am the mill, and there’s a breach in my head, from which only blue fetid smoke emerges.

When we sit around the hearth, I cannot help but to throw the rations in its flames. What I eat and drink, it all tastes like ash, and it’s grey and brittle inside, and no holy water can save it from taint. I sacrifice the ash to the Flame, still hoping that it might accept my beseeching. It only grins at me with its luminosity, and it’s colder around the fire than further away. Someone or something tries to approach me, but it has no color! No shadow! No glimmer! I send this shapeless thing away, my limbs twitching maddeningly and my eyes burning inside out as I yell and cover.

Sometimes I swing my mace, and I hear more screams, more gasps—both mine and someone else’s. There’s a song playing distorted, and a shout ordering me to throw myself into the gleaming abyss. I don’t know who is commanding me anymore! I don’t know who sings its hymns of ruin right into my ears! Its shape and color is eluding from me, and I cannot even convince myself it’s the same white Light, although in a different form. Is it? Is it not? Would the men of science tell me the answer? Would their eyes stay intact under the corrosion of that miasma around the mill? Mine surely haven’t.

The ground beneath me shifts, and I fall, and there’s nothing to hold me still. Just as intended, just as predicted! My prayers are of no worth now. The stars laugh at me—blinking eyes and gleaming teeth of the Light. The maws of the beasts on the earth are usually black; but this one is beaming with dozens of colors, and it’s hot inside as I dive in.

Something touches me, but I reject it! Something tries to pick me up, but I deny it! Anything to end my suffering, to stop seeing, hearing, crying, falling, living! Let the Light devour me, let its shades swarm me like vermin swarms the corpses! I can no longer think or guess what whispers to me to stop and gouge my eyes and sever my ears and slash my throat. My blood blinks, like the eyes of the Light.

May I believe at my final moments that it is the Light in its hypostasis. May I accept that it’s in its might to let my body turn ashen and friable, with remains of my spirit glowing inside. May I drop all fake vestements and versebooks and weaponry blessed by fictitous prophets in favor of the veil of gloss of the Light itself. I mark myself with a sign painfully red, and welcome the burst of the comet that would make my flesh melt and petrify and collapse while the color screams and calls for me.

And may my husk not revivify itself once again, back in the Hamlet, with my mind mismatched but intact, with the memory of my death still imprinted in it!


End file.
